New study examines housing financialization impacts on racialized communities, makes recommendations for change
A new report by Dr. Nemoy Lewis of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning sheds light on the many ways in which housing financialization in Canada has affected racialized people and Black communities, contributing to complex economic and social disenfranchisement that we’re only beginning to understand.
His report, “The Uneven Racialized Impacts of Housing Financialization (external link) ” [download available], is part of a series of six reports (external link) released on September 8 by the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate (external link) , under the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The Office calls the financialization of housing a growing issue in Canada that “is not only driving house prices out of reach for middle-class families – it is also denying members of disadvantaged groups their fundamental human rights…[with] the greatest impact on disadvantaged groups.” Lewis’ report is key to this conclusion.
Financialization and the transformation of multi-family housing
Starting with an overview of the phenomenon globally, Lewis examines how economically disenfranchised groups have been put at financial and housing risk by instruments such as subprime mortgages and financialized landlords from the ‘90s onwards. Private, profit-oriented investment in housing has made Canada’s multifamily sector “one of the most sought-after asset classes in the world.” (p.18). Its presence in rental markets across the country has directly contributed to gentrification, neighbourhood displacement, and a growing eviction and homelessness crisis in Canada.
Compound impacts uneven; worse for racialized people
Lewis argues that effects of housing financialization have had greater negative impact on racialized populations, especially Black people, in Toronto and across the country. For example, his investigation of the impact of evictions from multi-family rental housing in Toronto during the COVID-19 pandemic (when sudden income loss was putting many at risk of missing rent payments) shows that renters in areas with high Black populations, already among the most rent-burdened in the country, were disproportionately feeling the force of evictions by private landlords. (p.25) Offering a case study of Eglinton West in Toronto, Lewis demonstrates that private landlords are buying local assets to capitalize on urban renewal in the area known as Little Jamaica, taking advantage of the potential for extraction of much higher rents in future, when local area residents have clearly identified affordable rental housing and commercial space as a present and future need in the community.
Protecting housing as a human right
What these stories and others like it amount to, Lewis writes, is “a banishment and erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized groups and low-income families from urban communities. In the context of Little Jamaica, the concept of racial banishment helps to foreground the fundamental role of states and private financial actors in this ongoing violent dispossession and displacement of Black people afoot across the region and beyond.” (p.36)
While Lewis’ report (external link) cites numerous other studies measuring various effects of housing financialization on racialized people, it points to the need for more investigation into their lived experience of eviction, displacement and dispossession to truly understand the full spectrum of impact on individuals, households and communities. Dr. Lewis also calls for scrutiny of “the anti-Black logic that is constitutive for spatial accumulation of capital,” (p.29) and offers recommendations (p. 37) for policy changes to improve the situation of racialized communities, increase affordable rental housing, and place greater emphasis on the right to housing and access to housing as a human right, which Canada has affirmed (external link) .
Read more about Dr. Lewis and his active research projects on the School of Urban and Regional Planning website, and follow him on Twitter (external link) . Feature photo by Narciso Arellano, courtesy of Unsplash.